Eva Marie Saint, the Oscar-winning actress whose performances in “On the Waterfront” and “North by Northwest” helped define a generation of American screen acting, died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.
Saint won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her first major film role, as Edie Doyle opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s 1954 drama “On the Waterfront,” which took home eight Oscars including best picture, best actor and best director. In her later years she had become the oldest living Academy Award winner, a distinction Variety noted in its remembrance of her nearly seven-decade career.
From live television to the waterfront
Born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised largely near Albany, New York, Saint set out to become a teacher before discovering acting at Bowling Green State University. She broke into New York’s live-television anthology circuit in the early 1950s, appearing on “Philco Playhouse,” “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Studio One,” and earning Emmy nominations for a 1954 production of “Middle of the Night” and a 1955 musical adaptation of “Our Town” opposite Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra.
It was a 1953 television production of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” co-starring Lillian Gish, that changed the course of her career. Kazan saw the performance and cast her as Edie Doyle over several more experienced actresses who had been considered for the role.
Amid scenes of carnage, she gives tenderness and sensitivity to genuine romance.
The New York Times, in its 1954 review of “On the Waterfront”
Hitchcock’s cool, calculating spy
Five years after “Waterfront,” Alfred Hitchcock cast Saint as Eve Kendall, the duplicitous spy who matches wits with Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in 1959’s “North by Northwest,” a role that remains among the most closely identified with her. Reassessing the performance on Saint’s 97th birthday, Variety’s critics wrote that she “proves to be much more than a standard damsel in distress,” staying several steps ahead of Thornhill for most of the picture.
Saint largely avoided a studio contract, returning instead to stage work in productions of “The Rainmaker” and “Desire Under the Elms” even as her film career widened to include 1960’s “Exodus,” John Frankenheimer’s “All Fall Down” opposite Warren Beatty, and 1965’s “The Sandpiper” with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Norman Jewison’s Cold War comedy “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” followed in 1966, and her performance opposite George Segal in 1970’s “Loving” is often ranked among her finest dramatic work.
As she raised a family from the late 1950s onward, Saint worked more intermittently in film and concentrated on stage and television. She had a recurring role on the ABC series “Moonlighting” as Cybill Shepherd’s mother, and in 1990 she won an Emmy, on her fifth nomination, for the NBC miniseries “People Like Us.” Younger audiences later knew her as Martha Kent, the adoptive mother of Clark Kent, in 2006’s “Superman Returns.” Her final big-screen role came in 2014, in Akiva Goldsman’s “Winter’s Tale.”
Saint, whose career spanned more than six decades, returned to the Academy Awards stage in 2009 to present the best supporting actress Oscar, 55 years after her own win in that category. She was a longtime supporter of the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the Epilepsy Foundation of Los Angeles, and served on the Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship screenwriting committee.
Her husband, television director Jeffrey Hayden, died in 2016 after nearly 65 years of marriage. Survivors include her two children, Darrell and Laurette; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
No funeral details had been announced as of Tuesday night. Saint outlived nearly every other principal cast member of both “On the Waterfront” and “North by Northwest,” and tributes from across the film industry were expected in the coming days, with retrospectives of her work likely at repertory houses and on classic-film television through the fall.
